Comment from Biochar Policy Project of the National Center for Appropriate Technology

This comment is being submitted by Chuck Hassebrook, Director of the Biochar Policy Project of the National Center for Appropriate Technology, Dr. Robert Brown, Anson Marston Distinguished Professor in Engineering and Gary and Donna Hoover Chair in Mechanical Engineering at Iowa State University, and Dr. David Laird, Co-founder and President of N-Sense, and Professor-Emeritus of Agronomy at Iowa State University. We request that our names be removed from the document before it is posted to the public. We include our names herein only because your automated system does not provide for naming cosubmitters. We are writing to urge you to modify the Definition of a Qualified Facility in 1.45Z-1(b)(18) which provides that a qualified facility for producing SAF must be limited to a single production line that includes all components that function interdependently to produce the fuel. That requirement would be profoundly damaging to small business and impede the development of fast pyrolysis pathways that produce phenolic oil and sugar as biointermediates for production of SAF, along with a biochar coproduct that can be used as a soil amendment. The optimal scale of facilities for fast pyrolysis of cellulosic biomass is limited by the cost and logistics of shipping bulky low value biomass feedstocks, such as corn stover (stalks, husks, etc.) and dead wood removed from forest to reduce fire risk. By contrast, the economies of size for oil refineries are large. Thus, it would not be efficient or feasible to build a small refinery to refine the oil from one pyrolysis facility. Likewise, it would not be feasible to build an ethanol plant just to ferment the relatively small amount of sugar produced at one pyrolysis facility. The only economically feasible way to produce SAF in a single production line would be to establish a huge production line that involves many pyrolysis facilities supplying sugar to a much larger centralized ethanol facility and oil to a much larger centralized oil refinery. That would effectively shut small locally owned businesses out of the SAF market, because the capital requirements would be far beyond the capacity of small business. It would also impede development of a pyrolysis-based industry for SAF production. New industries generally develop over time by initially proving concepts at a modest scale with modest investment, and scaling up only after the process has been demonstrated at a smaller, less expensive and less risky scale. The proposed rule would cut the bottom rungs off of the development ladder, severely impeding development of a pyrolysis-based industry for production of SAF. We recognize legitimate concerns that tracking and verifying carbon credits can be difficult when intermediate products are moved from one facility to another. To address that concern while also removing the impediment to the fast pyrolysis pathway to SAF, we propose allowing a pyrolysis facility to supply no more than two upgrading facilities, with one receiving the sugar biointermediate and the other receiving the phenolic oil biointermediate for further processing into SAF. Thank you for considering our views.